For instance, commodities like copper rallied as investors turned increasingly bullish on base metals amid President-elect Donald Trump's plan to boost infrastructure spending.
But now, with history suggesting that the Trump rally will end with Friday's inauguration, doubts over the impact of infrastructure spending on metal prices have also grown.
Barclays analyst Dane David is the latest to join the side of the bears. In a commodities research note that measures the likely impact of Trump's infrastructure plan on metal prices, he wrote, "Hopes for a large infrastructure boost look premature."
While nobody knows whether Trump will deliver on his spending promises, or what their impact would be, extrapolation from past data offers some clues.
"The 2009 stimulus should provide an excellent case study of what happens in the US when billions of dollars are spent on steel- and copper-intensive projects," David said. "Of the $837bn allocated to spending in the stimulus, $105.3bn was allocated to US infrastructure spending, the breakdown of which is shown in Figure 5."
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